The Sky Road

aren’t interested in a deal either. So it’s only a question of time before they’re rolling down the road from Semey. But that’s just background. We have some urgent matters to discuss.

“I’m going to start with something that may not seem like the first item on the agenda, but bear with me.” She waved a hand at the window. “These people can wait. It’s about Georgi’s death. Jason Nikolaides here has told me the results of a CIA investigation—murder, using a spacer nanotech weapon. Hard to detect traces, but Jason says they’ve done it, and I believe him. What I don’t believe is that the spacist bastards did it. Whoever did it wanted two things—one, that Georgi’s offer didn’t get through to the Kazakhstanis before the coup. Two, that we wouldn’t co-operate with the space movement in the coup. Now, seeing as nobody except Georgi knew he was planning to make that offer, our range of suspects is a bit narrow. Basically, it has to be someone that Georgi would run the idea past, someone outside the government information loop—maybe in the Sovnarkom, maybe not.”

She looked down, playing with the Glock’s slide for a moment, then looked up. She’d been thinking aloud, she hadn’t had time yet to go through all the possibilities.

“Val!” she shouted. Everybody jumped. “If I thought it was you, I’d slam you against the wall till your teeth rattled to get the truth out of you. You and Georgi were both in the Party, unlike anyone else here.”

She smiled, pleased to see her colleagues off balance. “But as it happens, I trust you. Same with Andrei, who’s never been into that sort of shit anyway. Denis, now—”

The secret policeman looked up and moistened his lips.

T swear, Myra—”

Tt’s all right,” Jason interrupted. “The Company checked him out. He’s clear.” He glanced at Myra, then grinned at Denis Gubanov. “Bit of a commie son-of-a-bitch, but he’s on your side.”

“Good,” said Myra, winging it. “I’m going through this to confirm that nobody here is a suspect. That leaves only one possibility. Georgi must have shared his idea with somebody, and it can only have been the FI Mil Org. The General.”

She let them think about that while she explained to Jason, Nurup and Mustafa about the nukes and the AI.

“It has its own agenda,” she concluded, addressing everyone again. “And it’s working through the Sheenisov. It wants those nukes, very badly. So do the spacers. Whether they used each other—the information on one side, the weapon from the other—knowingly or not, Georgi’s murder was a move in that rivalry. Whoever controls these weapons has a gun at the head of everyone and everything in Earth orbit and at Lagrange—which adds up to about ninety-five percent of the human space presence. And I would remind you that, thanks to the coup and counter- coup, the General controls most of the Space Defense battlesats. Now, this has a bearing on what we do about the UN ultimatum. Which is—” she grinned ferally “—the second item on the agenda.”

“Excuse me,” said Jason, standing up. “Just who does control these nukes, at the moment?”

“We do,” said Valentina and Myra, at the same time. Myra gave Val an especially warm smile, hoping that her apparent—and partly paranoically real—earlier suspicion hadn’t wounded their friendship beyond repair.

“It’s dual key,” Valentina explained. “Defence Minister and Prime Minister have to go into the command- center workspace at the same time.”

“And, well, it’s not hardcoded in, but right now obviously we have a treaty commitment to give the President of Kazakhstan the final say,” Myra added. “And his strategy, at the moment, is to stonewall until the last minute, to try and get some military aid concessions out of the Western powers and/or the UN against the Sheenisov.”

“So he intends to turn them over eventually?” Jason asked.

Myra hesitated. “OK,” she said at last. “This doesn’t go beyond this room, and that goes for everyone here. You guys at the window, too—military discipline, death penalty under the Freedom of Information Law if you breathe a word of it. Everybody clear?”

They all were.

“All right then—yes, he does intend for us to turn them over, eventually. What else can we do?”

“We can use the weapons,” said Denis. “In space.”

Val’s lips set in a thin line. Myra shook her head.

“Massacre,” she said. “I won’t do it, except as a last resort.”

“You’re all missing the point,” said Jason. He looked around at all of them, as though unsure whether he had a right to speak.

“Go on,” said Myra.

“OK,” said Jason, “I’m just speaking for myself here, not for the CIA or East America. I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to either of them. Anyway… the point you’re all missing is: who are you going to surrender your weapons to? Formally, no doubt, it’ll be the UN. But physically, somebody’s gonna have to dock with them, bring them in, disarm them. Space Defense, and maybe some of the space settlers, have the equipment and expertise to do that. There must be ways of getting past the software of your controls—there always are. Believe me, there are no uncrackable codes any more. Your cooperation would be useful, but it’s not essential.”

Myra lit a cigarette. “OK,” she said. “So?”

Jason paced over to the window, peered out. “Still quiet,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “We’ve been in here, what? Half an hour? Soon be time to talk to the people, Myra.”

“That’s cool,” Denis said. “We’ve got agitators out there, they’re keeping people more or less up to speed. The line is that the President is negotiating.”

“As I’m sure he is,” said Jason. “But what does either side have to negotiate? Both sides have hit the bottom of the tank. You have nothing to offer, and the West has nothing to offer you. They will not save you from the Sheenisov. So if I were any of the other players—in particular, the spacers and your FI Mil Org, rogue AI or not—I’d be working very fast right now on two objectives. One is taking you guys and your wonderful dual-key command- centre out physically. The other is lining up rendezvous with the nukes in space. You can bet that while you think you’re smart, stringing them along, they are stringing you along, and they’re both going after the same things.”

He looked around again, more confident now. “This is endgame. Not just for us, but for them. One side or the other—the West-stroke-spacers-stroke-Outwarders, or the East-stroke-the-General-strokeSheenisov—is going to grab these weapons and use them, sooner rather than later.”

“But—” shouted Val, shocked. “The ablation cascade!”

“Not a problem for either of them, at the level we’re talking about. The Sheenisov’s horizons are strictly Earthbound, for the next few centuries. And their computers are invulnerable to EMP hits-they’re mechanical, not electronic. As to the spacists and the Mil Org, neither of them is dependent on going back to Earth, or on anything else getting off. And each unit of these forces probably calculates that they can cut and run for a higher orbit, or La-grange. Of course, they’d rather avoid it, but if they have to they’ll take it on the chin.

“So my advice to you all,” he concluded, “and to those people out there, is get the hell out And warn everybody that at the first sign of any messing with you, or Kazakhstan, or the nukes—you’ll blow them all to hell. Use the nukes against battlesats or detonate in place—either way you’ll set off the ablation cascade.”

“Christ,” said Myra, shaken. “That means the end of satellite guidance, global positioning, comsats, the nets, everything! It’ll be like the world going blind!”

“Yeah,” said Jason grimly. “And every army in the world, too. They’re so dependent on space-based comms and sims that they’ll be fucked. Except for the marginals, the Greens, the barbarians and the Sheenisov.” He laughed. “If that doesn’t scare them, nothing will.”

The guards at the window were moving from the sides to the centre, gazing out with complete lack of concern for cover. One of them turned around.

“The cavalry has arrived,” he said.

For a moment Myra thought he meant the Sheenisov. Then she realised that Chingiz had come through on his promise, and that the cavalry was their own.

The steppe at nightfall was a moving mass of vehicles and horses. As far as Myra knew, every last person in Kapitsa was moving out. She rode somewhere near the front; she tried to ride at the front, but she kept being overtaken by people in vehicles faster than her black mare. The Sovnarkom rump, and Jason and her mujahedin, rode in jeeps beside her. With her eyeband image-intensifiers at full power